After all, isn’t Free Software all about Hardware ?
Friday, May 8th, 2009Yes, another silly question you may think !
And you’d certainly be right in an ideal world made of Free hardware, open specs, and so on. But we aren’t, we are in the world of Hardware, deeply propriatery Hardware !
People tend to get more and more open to Free Software : they’ve heard about it, some of them tried it, other use some popular softs like OpenOffice or Firefox in their daily use of a computer. Why are those software so popular ? Just because they run on every platform you may find (OK, not only, also because they are very good software, but you already know this :-). The price is often statically linked libraries, but who cares except some nerds at the cost of broadband today ? What is important here is that you can totally abstract from hardware with those softwares, and nearly from the underlying OS.
Things get worse when you want to connect a printer to your brand new GNU/linux desktop. Even if most of the time you can click along “Add a printer” in a prefpane and get it work, there are some cases where this won’t work as simple. Here you loose your potential switcher which is afraid from what has to be done to get it work, or worse if the answer falls on “you’ll have to wait for someoneto write the driver, or write it yourself”. Yes, it’s partly the user’s fault because he thought he made a bargain buying this cheap d**l printer for an extra euro with his computer. But the fact is : even if he’s first thought was to throw away the original system, he’s now locked in by this little piece of hardware that has no Linux driver.
Things will go the same way with a scanner, digital camera, webcam, phone, pda… and every imaginable (or not) piece of hardware that one owns and want to use along with his computer. The longer the list, higher the probablility to find one that is not functionnal under GNU/Linux, or not fully, or without the support of this killer feature that made the appliance interesting.
If one would buy things when needed it wouldn’t be really a problem : one would search for a “compatible” model, et voilà ! But as the world goes, people tend to buy things because of mental images they made of them, or their use… et patatras, the dream flies away in the sky.
So using Free Software is also a way of consuming, and more precisely of less consuming. In running Free OSes, you learn to run away from advertising and to make opinions about things before buying them. You learn to go for Hardware made by people that are aware of Free Software and that write good drivers or at least give good specs on their hardware. In fact this simplifies a lot what and where you buy !
Finally, spreading Free Software, is also finding good hardware to spread it on. When you are given closed hardware, often you can’t go further with Free Software because you won’t get it working properly, or this would require too much work for what it’s worth… except with the help of the community of course, which solves many of those situations, but not all, far from that.